| Thursday, July 11, 2002 |
01:07 - Another Satisfied Customer
http://www.furry.org.au/BO/
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No way could I let this pass without comment.
I really, really hate fucking Windows and the fact that things just fail for no reason, and you can never tell whether it's hardware or software. You never know who's to blame, or whom to ask for help. I don't want to depend on computers anymore, either, so I won't update my website very often. I don't even want to play computer games, anymore. Now that I've tried XP, I've sworn never to updrage anything ever again. I just hate computers. I started out on an Amiga 1000 when I was eight years old and since then, all I ever wanted to do is program computers and develop kickass video games. Now, I can't even stand to look at one. It's not the hardware that bugs me, it's the fact that programmers are just so stupid and don't understand basic design principles, like labeling, and telling the user what the program needs, instead of trying to find it automatically, and simply quitting if the program can't find it. Many programmers in the world just deserve to be thrown into a pit and lit on fire. I just wish my job didn't require such an intimate knowledge of them. But then, who has a choice? Everything is computerized these days and it's driving me nuts!
...And that's just the very beginning.
If you have any desire to read a long tale of Windows-induced woe, either for purposes of commiseration or of schadenfreude, I recommend taking in this Dostoevskian tract. Make sure you've got a stiff drink or something handy, though, so you can raise it to him and his fortitude and wish him improved mental health, toward which (in my opinion) taking a vacation from Windows will contribute more than Zoloft will.
No, before you sneer at me to such an effect, I wouldn't dream of e-mailing this guy to tell him to get a Mac. Yes, it's an extremely easy conclusion to draw for someone in my position that not a word of this story would have occurred if he'd been running Macs (no BIOS-flashing woes, no unlabeled and indistinguishable motherboards, no worrying about whether doing file operations in console mode will truncate your long filenames, no hardware made by a "weird Japanese company I'd never heard of"... and no, Macs really do not have a separate-but-equal litany of things that can go wrong)-- but that's not helpful at all. If someone wants to discover for himself why tech-savvy computing veterans like us have made the switch to the Mac and never for an instant regretted it, that's his business-- we'd welcome it, naturally, but nobody likes to be consoled over the death of a friend by a white-shirted Dapper Dan who pats you on the shoulder and tells you that if only he'd become a brother in the One True Church of Frank, your friend would now be frolicking happily in Heaven. But it's not too late for you, friend!
But for the benefit of any readers who have any interest in such matters-- just read the page, and then you will understand what we understand. And that is this:
Computing does not have to be this way.
How else can I say it?
It saddens me to see people have to go through this kind of pain, but it saddens me still more to know that if the fortunes of the world had gone a little bit differently-- if the buying public's priorities had been tilted just a whisker more toward uncompromising quality than rock-bottom price, which in a very minutely different alternate universe it might well have been-- these kinds of nightmares would be all but unknown. I can't adequately convey the grief I feel at the thought that this is the kind of impression of computers that we will look back on in history books a hundred years from now, seeking answers to why our laws of technology and our expectations of what the computers of that age are like have become so intractably convoluted and inefficient and antagonistic toward us humans.
The problems described in the article are exactly the kinds of problems that are alleviated by whole-widget engineering. Choice in hardware is nice, but look-- more and more, people are deciding that the instability and unpredictability that it introduces are too high a price to pay; a marginally slower computer that works is infinitely more useful than a superfly computer that you have to wrestle with just to get it to boot. More and more people are buying prebuilt Dells and Compaqs with paid tech support than building their own computers, and that's another trend that Apple predicted twenty years ago and addressed long before its time.
If I were Steve Jobs, I would be sitting with my head in my hands at my desk, wondering just why in God's green Hell anybody still puts up with Windows.
(Yes, I know the answer. But from Steve's perspective, he has the solution. It's so obvious as to cause physical pain. But the people who are discovering that solution are still being outnumbered by new Windows users coming online every day.)
It's not a hopeless situation, though. There's still a chance while Apple lives, and as long as there are still people who both a) understand the importance of good human-centric design and b) do not feel too helpless in the face of a monolithic status quo to do anything about it.
I don't know what else I can say to try to get this point across. The Mac is not just a marginalized also-ran made by a dying company. It is a symbol of a better world; it's computing the way it should have been. And those who have switched to it feel no desire to switch back-- lack of games or no, slower CPUs or no, limited choice in hardware or no, higher prices or no, it really is that much better.
More and more people are discovering that on their own steam, though, and that's where so much of my optimism these days comes from.
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